12 ms·

Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus strategy’

54 points by mrfusion 6y ago

opwieurposiu 6y ago
I am happy this worked out for them. Sweden is a great country, I wish them well.
udev 6y ago
"Up to now Sweden has recorded 5,838 coronavirus deaths, giving it the fifth-highest per capita death rate in Europe, [...]" Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino). It is the 11th worst mortality in the world, again excluding the same two microstates. Not sure how one can "vindicate" a strategy that lead to that, unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave, and Sweden somehow ends up on the other side of the table, with 11th best in the world. They tried, props for the courage, but they fucked up.
- tonymet 6y ago
  Don’t judge until the end
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    When is this end? After how many deaths do you throw in the towel and admit you fucked up? Is treating you country like a guinea pig really a good leadership idea? It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance. We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't but there's no political will to implement since most politicians care more about being reelected rather than making short term unpopular decisions that could save lives long term since most of their Average Joe voters care more about their freedom to go on vacation and not having to wear masks everywhere than stopping the virus.
    - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
      The end is when COVID is either endemic in your country, or is no longer able to spread exponentially even without any non-permanent large-scale interventions. Sweden can't "throw in the towel" and go back to before 2020 -- the people who have died have already died (and notably, more than half of the COVID-19 deaths so far in Sweden happened before May 1, and about 90% before mid June). Implementing lockdown measures now won't bring those people back to life, and since the number of cases is low and continuing to decrease now, also would have very little benefit otherwise. Unless you're referring to stopping lockdown measures as "throwing in the towel and admitting you fucked up", in which case the answer is "definitely not before there's some plausible story you can tell about why it's fine to do that now but wasn't before". And any country that hasn't had widespread community spread like Sweden is likely to see the same sort of spread Sweden saw early on if they implement the same measures Sweden did.
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      When the virus is either under control or has become a normal part of the disease cycle like the flu. Right now all stats are incomplete and no one knows how the situation will develop based on the strategies. > It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEOs performance. Yes, it's like that if it was in the middle of a worldwide recession with incomplete numbers and all companies were dealing with similar issues. Sweden has done some things differently, and it will be interesting to see how that stacks up when we eventually know enough to judge it. > We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't Do we? To me it seems like we have both successful and non-successful countries taking wildly different strategies and the long term effects on society are not known. Either you know something the rest of us don't or you're wrong.
      - elcritch 6y ago
        Precisely, it’s pretty easy to tell from the Covid-19 death rate in Sweden that’s its reached a saturation point. The last few weeks have had < ~5 COVID-19 related deaths per day. It’s flat-lined, while many countries will continue likely having second, third, or even fourth waves. If a vaccine is developed and widely distributed, then that’d be a good stopping condition as well. The health institute in Sweden isn’t by running an experiment anymore than the "experiments" running in say NY & CA. Every thing I’ve read indicates broad national Swedish support, of course there’s dissenters but news sources would indicate they’re in the minority. Compare that to the contention in say CA, or Germany over the lockdown/shutdowns of normal life. In the grand scheme I believe most people will realize a total of 5,000 deaths in a country that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year isn’t extreme. Unfortunate, but not much different from most years (it’s possible Sweden will overall lose less people than the average on previous years). Just this cause has a lot of scary news behind it.
  - kingnaldo 6y ago
    "the end" as in "the world's end"?
- maa5444 6y ago
  the test sre non sense ...they amplify 40 times .. just to find something
- controversy 6y ago
  The disease will not be wiped out by masks and hand washing. Germany and other countries are finding their rates of infection increasing as people leave their bunkers. The model used by most of Europe is not sustainable. People can’t bunker down in their homes forever. Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Nobody in Europe is bunkered in their homes since March-April. The numbers have increased exactly because people are free to go anywhere on their summer vacation and party as they wish, causing new fires to erupt.
  - cygx 6y ago
    Your cost-benefit analysis is incomplete: Covid-19 can cause long-term lung damage even in the young.
    - listenallyall 6y ago
      So can smoking. What is your point?
    - controversy 6y ago
      We don’t know that. The body could heal. Also there was little thought to comorbidities in most papers.
      - cygx 6y ago
        You're right to point out that I should have thrown in some further qualification (it's too early to make definitive statements about long-term consequences). Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1]) This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5
- qeternity 6y ago
  Sweden and the US will likely have very front loaded death tolls. Other countries will either accept the reality that a vaccine is still far away, or they will yo-yo in and out of lockdown while wreaking economic carnage.
  - matz1 6y ago
    US have lockdown though
  - emerged 6y ago
    I do sometimes wonder how consistently different countries attribute deaths to COVID. There's no way a naive direct comparison is accurate.
  - arrrg 6y ago
    The US experience is yo-yo-ing in and out of lockdown. Many countries do not have that experience.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  On the other hand, it looks like they're only slightly ahead of the U.S. in death rate and behind the UK, so... I'm not totally sure what that tells us, to be honest.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    US and UK responses to the pandemic were probably the worst mismanaged in the developed world, so that’s not a peer group that Sweden would like to be in.
    - worker767424 6y ago
      That was true a few months ago, but have you seen the current surge in new cases in Spain and France?
      - zimpenfish 6y ago
        Worth noting that the UK is currently undergoing a large surge in new cases too.
- matz1 6y ago
  11th worst mortality without lockdown? that is a win for me.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    There are 195 countries in the world. 11th worst is bad.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      Isn’t the point that they didn’t close the country so that’s a massive up side. Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway. (For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)
      - wolco 6y ago
        Now if you started sooner and if people took it more seriously perhaps numbers would be different.
        jonplackett 6y ago
        They did make it unnecessarily hard for people - the health minister went on live TV in late Feb and said it was about as deadly as Flu (no it's 10x more deadly). Then Boris Johnson went to a hospital and shook hands with Coronavirus patients and bragged about it (then got coronavirus). Then his top advisor broke lockdown by driving the length of the country (while he had coronavirus). Oh and our chief medial officer also got coronavirus. Couldn't ask for a less useful bunch of people.
        elcritch 6y ago
        Currently the IFR is estimated between 0.2-0.6%, or roughly about 2-6x deadlier. That’ll looks to keep decreasing in Sweden, and elsewhere. It’s not unreasonable that if it turns out to be only 2-4x deadlier that many would consider it not much worse than a bad flu season. Especially if you give them absolute numbers for scale, including total deaths in their country every year.
- toip34 6y ago
  The US has the 10th worst mortality per capita in the world (excluding microstates), so they're doing better than that at least.
  - 0xEFF 6y ago
    s/better/worse/ Edit: No, better is correct, missed the switch from 11th in europe to the 10th in the world.
    - toip34 6y ago
      No, better: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - triceratops 6y ago
    "Better than the worst" is not really a "vindication" though, is it?
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  Well, they are better off so far than France, Italy, the U.K., Spain, and Belgium, which is most of western Europe. So in other words, as good or better than most of western Europe. Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    By what measure are they better off?
  - cma 6y ago
    France has 5X the population density of Sweden though, so maybe France did much better considering that. Sweden has lots of barren arctic area though so it may not be a fair measure. You'd want to know how many people the average person interacts with pre COVID or something.
    - dariusj18 6y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-population-density?year=latest&time=2020-09-09 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po...
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      One of the most populated reigons of sweden (skåne) has one of the lowest per capita infection rate. Globally (on a country level) there does not seem to be a strong correlation between density and infection. I think it will take years to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't and why.
      - cma 6y ago
        I'm not sure what explains Skane being so low, but the highest per capita case county was also the county with the first case. So random seed case event timings seem to have been more important there: "On 31 January, the first Swedish case was confirmed in a woman in Jönköping who had travelled to Sweden from Wuhan, China, on 24 January directly from Wuhan. "
- odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
  They had 5838 COVID deaths, and around 5900 excess deaths. Portugal has 1800ish COVID deaths, 5800 excess deaths. Yes, Sweden fucked up and Portugal is amazing! OR maybe, just maybe, either COVID deaths are counted differently OR the lockdowns caused people that wouldn't have died of COVID to die for other causes due to lack of treatment and support. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Do you happen to know how they got that data out of euromomo? https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ hides per-country absolute value of excess death, giving only z-score by country or the value for all of Europe.
    - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
      No clue, but Portugal has almost real time reporting of deaths here: https://evm.min-saude.pt https://evm.min-saude.pt They mentioned euromomo but also have countries not in it, so I assume they use various sources?
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        I feel for the poor intern who has to visit a different site for every country (and every American state, probably) daily to compile this information.
        brnt 6y ago
        European statistics bureaus have mandates to share and normalize such data. Eurostat aggregates such data.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    You're cherry picking Portugal's screwup in general healthcare response when there are much better comparisons. The excess death rates in Sweden are much higher than all its neighbors which are much more comparable. At the peak z-scores of almost 15 in Sweden compared to less than 5 for Denmark, Finland and Norway. Right now Sweden is still of the 4 the one with more excess mortality. https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ And yet we keep hearing the same argument. You just wait and enough people will die in all those places to make up the difference.
- listenallyall 6y ago
  You're being obtuse. If, in fact, they have reached herd immunity (and obviously that's a big if) and future case counts are near zero, while other countries continue to record thousands of cases, they will rapidly move down the mortality list. I'd much rather be living in a country that's essentially done with the virus -- or at least isn't under perma-panic -- rather than one whose "experts" warn that kids won't be able to safely return to normal school for "years." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/19/coronavirus-scientists-warn-it-may-take-years-before-students-return-to-normal-schooling.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/19/cor...
  - okamiueru 6y ago
    How is he being obtuse? Are you not giving an example to the same hypothetical he presented?
    - listenallyall 6y ago
      He's stating they are 11th in mortality without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths. It's like calling a horse-race at the quarter-pole (except this is a race you'd prefer to finish last).
      - okamiueru 6y ago
        I think my reading comprehension is good enough to say that you are wrong. In fact, it is more the opposite of how you interpreted what he said. So, let's break it down. He said "...unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave". And you're reading it as "without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths". So, let's compare them. He presented it as a hypothetical about the future, and you presented it as fact about the future. So, the same sentiment, except you don't have the grounds for it. On top of that, you read it, and claimed he said the the opposite of what he did. I'm left wondering if you didn't understand what he said, or perhaps have a different idea of what "obtuse" means. I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really need an answer, as I'm sure we are done here.
- simonsarris 6y ago
  If the point of their herd strategy involves front-loading deaths then the higher relative death count at this point is a necessary baked-in expectation, not a failure.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    If you have to argue your stats are bad because you've "front-loaded deaths" maybe don't go around saying you are vindicated just yet?
    - pmarreck 6y ago
      Ripping the band-aid off certainly hurts less overall than the slow peel, no? :)
    - just-juan-post 6y ago
      On the other side of the coin perhaps we shouldn't restrict our fellow humans lives "because we just don't know what the long term effects are!!"
  - cygx 6y ago
    But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky. Yeah, the front loading strategy pretty much presumes that there will be no effective treatment or it will come too late to do any good. That may or may not be true. If an effective vaccine is developed, then Sweden's strategy will be the opposite of vindicated.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        No, it won't. Vaccines are irrelevant, they are far too slow to develop given the timelines of a virus. The virus has come and gone in most of the world and vaccines are still at the stage of being paused because of serious reactions.
- goalieca 6y ago
  A very shallow analysis only compares reported deaths on the scoreboard. We need to looks into the deaths and find out how many were actually preventable and where they all occurred. In Sweden, the care homes were particularly hard hit. There’s also more to life than merely covid and must consider those factors in the whole cost/benefit exercise. I’m not saying Sweden is better or worse, but an in depth analysis won’t be available for a while and especially while everything is still in chaos including our health care system which we were trying to save on the first place.
- username90 6y ago
  > Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino). If you count excess mortality instead of registered deaths then Neatherlands is also worse than Sweden. And if you also consider that the countries that are above Sweden are on average larger than the countries below then there are about as many who lives in countries with worse results than Sweden as there are people living in countries with better results. So it is fair to say that they have pretty average resullts for Europe. If you also add USA and Canada and talk about the west then there is no contest since you add 340 million people living in a country with worse results.
- rasz 6y ago
  Zapp Brannigan got a medal using same strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3g4Ua5e7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3g4Ua5e7k
Svip 6y ago
Isn't it a bit early to say that? As I understand it, there is still so much we don't understand about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. I am not sure whether the other strategies were better either, I think it would be a little premature to vindicate any strategy. I am merely speculating here, maybe due to the situation, Swedes had generally been more careful than their neighbours (i.e. Denmark, Norway and Finland), because their situation remained worse and worsened for longer, and they might be seeing a downturn in cases a few months later than neighbouring countries. Again, just speculating, but I also feel vindicating their strategy at this stage is doing exactly the same.
- nytesky 6y ago
  I think THIS may be the true secret to Swedish strategy, much like NYC -- it got so bad it really changed the conversation and people are still shell shocked and caution remains high to maintain social distancing, defer gathering in groups etc. If they aren't really getting together much indoors, masks won't be necessary for now (may need to be outside once winter comes and UV drops precipitously).
owenversteeg 6y ago
Basically, the article is saying that they've achieved herd immunity. Is that correct? As soon as a month ago I believe the consensus was that they were far away from it, with the total percentage that have antibodies somewhere around 15%. They also have significantly more deaths per capita than all but 3 EU countries (Italy, Spain and Belgium.) That said, I definitely don't think a country's deaths per capita necessarily indicate doing something totally wrong. Belgium, for example, has the 2nd worst number of deaths per capita - literally ten times more than many other EU countries - but they weren't materially different than their neighbors in their strategy, and indeed seemed to lock down harder...
- Svip 6y ago
  Belgium is also reporting any potential death linked to COVID-19 as that. Effectively, almost all excess death in Belgium is reported as COVID-19, leading to a far higher death per capita reporting from Belgium. Other countries usually require a proof that it was COVID-19 before reporting it as such.
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    Right, but there's other evidence that even with that, their situation was particularly bad. If you go by the excess-death numbers, Belgium is still the 2nd worst in the world. Why them, and not their neighbors?
    - raphaelj 6y ago
      Bad luck. A small country or state has an higher chance of being an outlier. 11M people live in Belgium, and a lot of +/- 10M inhabitant regions in larger countries have an higher death rate (Paris, NYC, Lombardy, Madrid ...). If you live in a large country, some highly impacted regions will be offset by less affected regions.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  The problem with antibodies is they don't seem to last that long. I remember reading about nurses who caught it multiple times. That's really bad news regarding herd immunity IMHO.
vannevar 6y ago
Well, other than having ten times as many deaths as the other Nordic countries: https://www.statista.com/topics/6123/coronavirus-covid-19-in-the-nordics/ https://www.statista.com/topics/6123/coronavirus-covid-19-in... I feel like lives lost is perhaps the better metric of success.
- controversy 6y ago
  No. Most of Sweden’s deaths were due to poor management at the beginning. They shoved the elderly into old folks homes with Covid positive patients.
  - he0001 6y ago
    They didn’t. Although they didn’t protect the elderly in the beginning, which is official.
pedrocr 6y ago
3x more people died than in places that did the consensus strategy. And they haven't stopped having more cases either. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. It will take a long time before that difference disappears, if it ever does, and it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore. What exactly has been vindicated?
- triceratops 6y ago
  > What exactly has been vindicated? Judging by some of the comments here, News Corp's ability to spin gold out of shit.
- orangecat 6y ago
  it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore Quarantining entire populations also has costs you can't ignore. What exactly has been vindicated? If the doomsayers were right, Sweden's lack of restrictions should have produced by far the highest death rates in Europe and probably the world. Instead they did better than many countries on all possible metrics: deaths, economic impact, and behavior restrictions. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. Even if true, that doesn't make it obviously the wrong call. On average, people who die from COVID would otherwise have lived around 12 years longer, so that's 48,000 life-years lost. On the other hand, putting 10 million people under lockdown for three months is 2.5 million life-years. If a lockdown decreases the average quality of life by even 2%, then that's a higher cost.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    The idea that Sweden had no lockdown measures at all and other places had draconian lockdowns where the whole population was closed down for three months is a strawman. They are also near the bottom on all those indicators you mentioned. Doing better than the US or Brasil is a very low bar for this. And what we're discussing here isn't that their strategy is "obviously wrong" it's that it's very definitely not "vindicated".
    - elcritch 6y ago
tpmx 6y ago
Yeah, the current positive test rate is relatively low because much we already had 6k deaths (approximately 5x the death rate of our neighbours Norway, Denmark and Finland per capita, iirc) and loads of infected people at risk for chronical diseases. So yes - there is some level of herd immunity already (although mostly in Stockholm/Uppsala/Linköping/Göteborg). We also do a lot less less tests than our neighbouring countries. Denmark in particular is really good at getting testing done, which is also a reason why they are seeing a spike in their results the past few weeks.
he0001 6y ago
There is an important point to make here. Sweden doesn’t have any laws where the government can order a shutdown. So even if they wanted to do a lockdown they couldn’t. Doctors can order individuals to be quarantined but not the country as a whole.
- tpmx 6y ago
  False. There is a large number of things that the government can limit/recommend to not used/etc that haven't been utilized. (I do recognize this argument from when arguing about this with swedish leftists.)
  - he0001 6y ago
    No. A Swedish citizen is, in general, free to go wherever they want on Swedish soil, including private property. This is protected by the Swedish constitution and one of the oldest base laws[0]. Also one reason to the governments slow reaction was due to they had to figure out what laws they could use in a situation like this. [0] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/darfor-kan-sverige-inte-utfarda-utegangsforbud https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/darfor-kan-sverige-inte...
    - okamiueru 6y ago
      Although this is true, the government, with enough political will could make the necessary changes. So instead of scurrying to find actions allowed within existing laws, they very well could have gone the way Norway did in enacting special measures, making greater restrictions legal. Also, there is a very far stretch between what that article discusses, and the measures other Scandinavian countries took (closing schools, limiting size of congregations, etc). The greatest limitation of "free movement" in Norway at least, was the restriction of cabin use when that cabin was in a different municipality.
      - he0001 6y ago
        Well, you don’t change a base law just like that and to do that would require a lot of other laws to be changed. And I’m not sure they would have gathered enough political will to do those changes. And that’s also what the government concluded. It’s kind of what the 2nd amendment to a US citizen is, and an individual right to do whatever they please without having the government to interfere.
vikramkr 6y ago
Compared to their peers in northern Europe that fared far better, the data does not suggest vindication. They have 5x the number of cases per capita compared to countries with similar social/economic/geographic conditions.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Yeah. Norway/Denmark/Finland all did better than us. :( This is all on the current swedish social democratic government.
JohnTHaller 6y ago
This is The Times in the UK reporting here, wholly owned by News Corp (aka Fox News' parent). They're trying to paint the failures of Sweden (5th highest per-capita death rate in Europe) as a success the same way they do in the US.
Yoofie 6y ago
I found this [1] twitter thread interesting regarding herd immunity. [1]: https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024 https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024
bjornedstrom 6y ago
Can you people please stop with this unhealthy attention. You need to understand that Swedish culture is really unhealthy right now and I ask all of you - I plead to you - as a Swede, to please stop giving Swedish policy attention so we can, on our own, solve our problems and get back to some kind of normalcy and humbleness. What has happened the past 30+ years and has become really problematic the past 10 years is that Sweden has this extremely unhealthy culture of believing in Swedish exceptionalism while at the same time craving attention from other nations, and promoting this belief socially. While the Swedish Corona strategy is not explicitly designed to be contrarian at the world stage (and therefor get a lot of attention), the way Swedish mono-culture works is that the people who implement policy (as well as many citizens) chauvinistically and subconsciously believe that Sweden is somehow superior to other nations and at the same time believe that Sweden (as an exceptional country) has something to teach inferior countries (i.e all other countries). So where we are right now is that we have this unhealthy feedback loop where Sweden initially did it's own thing, and as it turned out to be different that has been a signal to policy makers that Sweden is right. Because Sweden is exceptional, so if the policy is different from inferior countries (i.e all other countries), it must be right. I wish, probably more than anything else, that other countries would just stop giving Swedish policy makers this attention because then maybe, hopefully, our politicians can start to do what's right for our citizens instead of what gets attention and talking points at the world stage. This is far broader than Corona: Sweden gets way too much attention overall, because Swedish politicians and government communication employees have nailed "marketing" more than anything else. They crave this attention and they manufacture policy to get attention, at the expense of the people who live in the country. Often under the guise of marketing Sweden as a "moral super power", superior to other nations. So please, if you are for example a left leaning American, please don't use Sweden as a political piece. Don't give our politicians this attention. There are many other countries that deserve attention but they deserve attention because they do The Right Thing. Like Denmark. Not like Sweden that fucks things up but enjoy the attention it gets when doing so, citizens be damned.
smartbit 6y ago
https://archive.is/axCvG https://archive.is/axCvG for those who can’t read the whole article
IdontRememberIt 6y ago
When crushing the numbers and speaking with relatives in Sweden and Switzerland, it is striking to see that most of the dead counts are in house structures for elderly. When going deeper, there are 2 parameters that seem to correlate with the dead rates: 1) Sweden is lacking medical employees, therefore the medical education of the staff in these structures is very low. Also the geographical death distribution in the country is a big debate because some reasons could be "hot potato" topic 2) "replacebility" of the elderly: in luxury private structures, the death rate is very low because they protect the one paying the bill (so all the procedures are very strict). In public structures, the gov is paying the bill, and as soon as someone dies, it frees a bed for the next "customer". My father in law was in a public structure in Sweden and died this year. For several years we saw horrible things: medical staff/procedures does not care about deadly "common" viruses.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
Sweden left its old and vulnerable people unprotected and thousands of them died. Now the virus is less deadly because there are fewer people left who are vulnerable to it. At the start of the pandemic Anders Tegnel, the architect of Sweden's response to the virus, did not believe that asymptomatic carriers existed [1], so Sweden's Public Health Agency instructed health workers in care homes to only stay at home if they had symptoms and to not wear any PPE at work [2]. So they carried the virus into the care homes and a hecatomb of old people ensued. Obviously, now that the most vulnerable are gone, the virus kills many fewer patients. Swedes don't even need to have immunity to the virus, as such. They just need to be young and healthy enough to survive it if they get it. Not so much heard immunity, as herd culling. For comparison, let's take Greece, where I'm from and which is a country with a similar population to that of Sweden (about 10 million each). Greece imposed a draconian lockdown in early March, as soon as the severity of the pandemic became obvious (we are right next to Italy, after all). The result was about ~2500 infections and ~140 dead by 1st July when the lockdown was lifted [3]. Remember, that's in a country with a similar population as Sweden (but with a much more touchy-feely, huggy-kissy, family-dinner Mediterrannean culture than Sweden). Now we've opened our borders and we're doing business (= tourism) as usual. Infections have also risen, but deaths are still very low, in the single or low double digits daily, so that about 300 people have died since the start of the pandemic. It's all pretty manageable and our health system is not overwhelmed. We had a total lockdown, lost very few people, but we're back in action and deaths are low despite rising infections. And without letting our old and vulnerable die in their thousands. We lost 300, Sweden lost 6,000. If Sweden's approach was vindicated- Greece's approach was vindicated tenfold. ____________ [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly small compared to people who show symptoms. [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-sweden-as-elderly-pay-price-for-coronavirus-strategy https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-swede... The agency’s advice to those managing and working at nursing homes, like its policy towards coronavirus in general, has been based on its judgment that the “spread from those without symptoms is responsible for a very limited share” of those who get infected. Its advice to the care workers and nurses looking after older people such as Bondesson’s 69-year-old mother is that they should not wear protective masks or use other protective equipment unless they are dealing with a resident in the home they have reason to suspect is infected. Otherwise the central protective measure in place is that staff should stay home if they detect any symptoms in themselves. [3] https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/greece https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/greece

54 points by mrfusion 6y ago

I am happy this worked out for them. Sweden is a great country, I wish them well.

udev 6y ago

"Up to now Sweden has recorded 5,838 coronavirus deaths, giving it the fifth-highest per capita death rate in Europe, [...]" Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino). It is the 11th worst mortality in the world, again excluding the same two microstates. Not sure how one can "vindicate" a strategy that lead to that, unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave, and Sweden somehow ends up on the other side of the table, with 11th best in the world. They tried, props for the courage, but they fucked up.

tonymet 6y ago
Don’t judge until the end
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  When is this end? After how many deaths do you throw in the towel and admit you fucked up? Is treating you country like a guinea pig really a good leadership idea? It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance. We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't but there's no political will to implement since most politicians care more about being reelected rather than making short term unpopular decisions that could save lives long term since most of their Average Joe voters care more about their freedom to go on vacation and not having to wear masks everywhere than stopping the virus.
  - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
    The end is when COVID is either endemic in your country, or is no longer able to spread exponentially even without any non-permanent large-scale interventions. Sweden can't "throw in the towel" and go back to before 2020 -- the people who have died have already died (and notably, more than half of the COVID-19 deaths so far in Sweden happened before May 1, and about 90% before mid June). Implementing lockdown measures now won't bring those people back to life, and since the number of cases is low and continuing to decrease now, also would have very little benefit otherwise. Unless you're referring to stopping lockdown measures as "throwing in the towel and admitting you fucked up", in which case the answer is "definitely not before there's some plausible story you can tell about why it's fine to do that now but wasn't before". And any country that hasn't had widespread community spread like Sweden is likely to see the same sort of spread Sweden saw early on if they implement the same measures Sweden did.
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    When the virus is either under control or has become a normal part of the disease cycle like the flu. Right now all stats are incomplete and no one knows how the situation will develop based on the strategies. > It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEOs performance. Yes, it's like that if it was in the middle of a worldwide recession with incomplete numbers and all companies were dealing with similar issues. Sweden has done some things differently, and it will be interesting to see how that stacks up when we eventually know enough to judge it. > We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't Do we? To me it seems like we have both successful and non-successful countries taking wildly different strategies and the long term effects on society are not known. Either you know something the rest of us don't or you're wrong.
    - elcritch 6y ago
      Precisely, it’s pretty easy to tell from the Covid-19 death rate in Sweden that’s its reached a saturation point. The last few weeks have had < ~5 COVID-19 related deaths per day. It’s flat-lined, while many countries will continue likely having second, third, or even fourth waves. If a vaccine is developed and widely distributed, then that’d be a good stopping condition as well. The health institute in Sweden isn’t by running an experiment anymore than the "experiments" running in say NY & CA. Every thing I’ve read indicates broad national Swedish support, of course there’s dissenters but news sources would indicate they’re in the minority. Compare that to the contention in say CA, or Germany over the lockdown/shutdowns of normal life. In the grand scheme I believe most people will realize a total of 5,000 deaths in a country that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year isn’t extreme. Unfortunate, but not much different from most years (it’s possible Sweden will overall lose less people than the average on previous years). Just this cause has a lot of scary news behind it.
- kingnaldo 6y ago
  "the end" as in "the world's end"?
maa5444 6y ago
the test sre non sense ...they amplify 40 times .. just to find something
controversy 6y ago
The disease will not be wiped out by masks and hand washing. Germany and other countries are finding their rates of infection increasing as people leave their bunkers. The model used by most of Europe is not sustainable. People can’t bunker down in their homes forever. Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Nobody in Europe is bunkered in their homes since March-April. The numbers have increased exactly because people are free to go anywhere on their summer vacation and party as they wish, causing new fires to erupt.
- cygx 6y ago
  Your cost-benefit analysis is incomplete: Covid-19 can cause long-term lung damage even in the young.
  - listenallyall 6y ago
    So can smoking. What is your point?
  - controversy 6y ago
    We don’t know that. The body could heal. Also there was little thought to comorbidities in most papers.
    - cygx 6y ago
      You're right to point out that I should have thrown in some further qualification (it's too early to make definitive statements about long-term consequences). Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1]) This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5
qeternity 6y ago
Sweden and the US will likely have very front loaded death tolls. Other countries will either accept the reality that a vaccine is still far away, or they will yo-yo in and out of lockdown while wreaking economic carnage.
- matz1 6y ago
  US have lockdown though
- emerged 6y ago
  I do sometimes wonder how consistently different countries attribute deaths to COVID. There's no way a naive direct comparison is accurate.
- arrrg 6y ago
  The US experience is yo-yo-ing in and out of lockdown. Many countries do not have that experience.
jrochkind1 6y ago
On the other hand, it looks like they're only slightly ahead of the U.S. in death rate and behind the UK, so... I'm not totally sure what that tells us, to be honest.
- pavlov 6y ago
  US and UK responses to the pandemic were probably the worst mismanaged in the developed world, so that’s not a peer group that Sweden would like to be in.
  - worker767424 6y ago
    That was true a few months ago, but have you seen the current surge in new cases in Spain and France?
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      Worth noting that the UK is currently undergoing a large surge in new cases too.
matz1 6y ago
11th worst mortality without lockdown? that is a win for me.
- p1necone 6y ago
  There are 195 countries in the world. 11th worst is bad.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Isn’t the point that they didn’t close the country so that’s a massive up side. Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway. (For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)
    - wolco 6y ago
      Now if you started sooner and if people took it more seriously perhaps numbers would be different.
      - jonplackett 6y ago
        They did make it unnecessarily hard for people - the health minister went on live TV in late Feb and said it was about as deadly as Flu (no it's 10x more deadly). Then Boris Johnson went to a hospital and shook hands with Coronavirus patients and bragged about it (then got coronavirus). Then his top advisor broke lockdown by driving the length of the country (while he had coronavirus). Oh and our chief medial officer also got coronavirus. Couldn't ask for a less useful bunch of people.
        elcritch 6y ago
        Currently the IFR is estimated between 0.2-0.6%, or roughly about 2-6x deadlier. That’ll looks to keep decreasing in Sweden, and elsewhere. It’s not unreasonable that if it turns out to be only 2-4x deadlier that many would consider it not much worse than a bad flu season. Especially if you give them absolute numbers for scale, including total deaths in their country every year.
toip34 6y ago
The US has the 10th worst mortality per capita in the world (excluding microstates), so they're doing better than that at least.
- 0xEFF 6y ago
  s/better/worse/ Edit: No, better is correct, missed the switch from 11th in europe to the 10th in the world.
  - toip34 6y ago
    No, better: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- triceratops 6y ago
  "Better than the worst" is not really a "vindication" though, is it?
rossdavidh 6y ago
Well, they are better off so far than France, Italy, the U.K., Spain, and Belgium, which is most of western Europe. So in other words, as good or better than most of western Europe. Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  By what measure are they better off?
- cma 6y ago
  France has 5X the population density of Sweden though, so maybe France did much better considering that. Sweden has lots of barren arctic area though so it may not be a fair measure. You'd want to know how many people the average person interacts with pre COVID or something.
  - dariusj18 6y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-population-density?year=latest&time=2020-09-09 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po...
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    One of the most populated reigons of sweden (skåne) has one of the lowest per capita infection rate. Globally (on a country level) there does not seem to be a strong correlation between density and infection. I think it will take years to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't and why.
    - cma 6y ago
      I'm not sure what explains Skane being so low, but the highest per capita case county was also the county with the first case. So random seed case event timings seem to have been more important there: "On 31 January, the first Swedish case was confirmed in a woman in Jönköping who had travelled to Sweden from Wuhan, China, on 24 January directly from Wuhan. "
odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
They had 5838 COVID deaths, and around 5900 excess deaths. Portugal has 1800ish COVID deaths, 5800 excess deaths. Yes, Sweden fucked up and Portugal is amazing! OR maybe, just maybe, either COVID deaths are counted differently OR the lockdowns caused people that wouldn't have died of COVID to die for other causes due to lack of treatment and support. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Do you happen to know how they got that data out of euromomo? https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ hides per-country absolute value of excess death, giving only z-score by country or the value for all of Europe.
  - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
    No clue, but Portugal has almost real time reporting of deaths here: https://evm.min-saude.pt https://evm.min-saude.pt They mentioned euromomo but also have countries not in it, so I assume they use various sources?
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      I feel for the poor intern who has to visit a different site for every country (and every American state, probably) daily to compile this information.
      - brnt 6y ago
        European statistics bureaus have mandates to share and normalize such data. Eurostat aggregates such data.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  You're cherry picking Portugal's screwup in general healthcare response when there are much better comparisons. The excess death rates in Sweden are much higher than all its neighbors which are much more comparable. At the peak z-scores of almost 15 in Sweden compared to less than 5 for Denmark, Finland and Norway. Right now Sweden is still of the 4 the one with more excess mortality. https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ And yet we keep hearing the same argument. You just wait and enough people will die in all those places to make up the difference.
listenallyall 6y ago
You're being obtuse. If, in fact, they have reached herd immunity (and obviously that's a big if) and future case counts are near zero, while other countries continue to record thousands of cases, they will rapidly move down the mortality list. I'd much rather be living in a country that's essentially done with the virus -- or at least isn't under perma-panic -- rather than one whose "experts" warn that kids won't be able to safely return to normal school for "years." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/19/coronavirus-scientists-warn-it-may-take-years-before-students-return-to-normal-schooling.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/19/cor...
- okamiueru 6y ago
  How is he being obtuse? Are you not giving an example to the same hypothetical he presented?
  - listenallyall 6y ago
    He's stating they are 11th in mortality without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths. It's like calling a horse-race at the quarter-pole (except this is a race you'd prefer to finish last).
    - okamiueru 6y ago
      I think my reading comprehension is good enough to say that you are wrong. In fact, it is more the opposite of how you interpreted what he said. So, let's break it down. He said "...unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave". And you're reading it as "without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths". So, let's compare them. He presented it as a hypothetical about the future, and you presented it as fact about the future. So, the same sentiment, except you don't have the grounds for it. On top of that, you read it, and claimed he said the the opposite of what he did. I'm left wondering if you didn't understand what he said, or perhaps have a different idea of what "obtuse" means. I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really need an answer, as I'm sure we are done here.
simonsarris 6y ago
If the point of their herd strategy involves front-loading deaths then the higher relative death count at this point is a necessary baked-in expectation, not a failure.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  If you have to argue your stats are bad because you've "front-loaded deaths" maybe don't go around saying you are vindicated just yet?
  - pmarreck 6y ago
    Ripping the band-aid off certainly hurts less overall than the slow peel, no? :)
  - just-juan-post 6y ago
    On the other side of the coin perhaps we shouldn't restrict our fellow humans lives "because we just don't know what the long term effects are!!"
- cygx 6y ago
  But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky. Yeah, the front loading strategy pretty much presumes that there will be no effective treatment or it will come too late to do any good. That may or may not be true. If an effective vaccine is developed, then Sweden's strategy will be the opposite of vindicated.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      No, it won't. Vaccines are irrelevant, they are far too slow to develop given the timelines of a virus. The virus has come and gone in most of the world and vaccines are still at the stage of being paused because of serious reactions.
goalieca 6y ago
A very shallow analysis only compares reported deaths on the scoreboard. We need to looks into the deaths and find out how many were actually preventable and where they all occurred. In Sweden, the care homes were particularly hard hit. There’s also more to life than merely covid and must consider those factors in the whole cost/benefit exercise. I’m not saying Sweden is better or worse, but an in depth analysis won’t be available for a while and especially while everything is still in chaos including our health care system which we were trying to save on the first place.
username90 6y ago
> Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino). If you count excess mortality instead of registered deaths then Neatherlands is also worse than Sweden. And if you also consider that the countries that are above Sweden are on average larger than the countries below then there are about as many who lives in countries with worse results than Sweden as there are people living in countries with better results. So it is fair to say that they have pretty average resullts for Europe. If you also add USA and Canada and talk about the west then there is no contest since you add 340 million people living in a country with worse results.
rasz 6y ago
Zapp Brannigan got a medal using same strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3g4Ua5e7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3g4Ua5e7k

Svip 6y ago

Isn't it a bit early to say that? As I understand it, there is still so much we don't understand about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. I am not sure whether the other strategies were better either, I think it would be a little premature to vindicate any strategy. I am merely speculating here, maybe due to the situation, Swedes had generally been more careful than their neighbours (i.e. Denmark, Norway and Finland), because their situation remained worse and worsened for longer, and they might be seeing a downturn in cases a few months later than neighbouring countries. Again, just speculating, but I also feel vindicating their strategy at this stage is doing exactly the same.

nytesky 6y ago
I think THIS may be the true secret to Swedish strategy, much like NYC -- it got so bad it really changed the conversation and people are still shell shocked and caution remains high to maintain social distancing, defer gathering in groups etc. If they aren't really getting together much indoors, masks won't be necessary for now (may need to be outside once winter comes and UV drops precipitously).

owenversteeg 6y ago

Basically, the article is saying that they've achieved herd immunity. Is that correct? As soon as a month ago I believe the consensus was that they were far away from it, with the total percentage that have antibodies somewhere around 15%. They also have significantly more deaths per capita than all but 3 EU countries (Italy, Spain and Belgium.) That said, I definitely don't think a country's deaths per capita necessarily indicate doing something totally wrong. Belgium, for example, has the 2nd worst number of deaths per capita - literally ten times more than many other EU countries - but they weren't materially different than their neighbors in their strategy, and indeed seemed to lock down harder...

Svip 6y ago
Belgium is also reporting any potential death linked to COVID-19 as that. Effectively, almost all excess death in Belgium is reported as COVID-19, leading to a far higher death per capita reporting from Belgium. Other countries usually require a proof that it was COVID-19 before reporting it as such.
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Right, but there's other evidence that even with that, their situation was particularly bad. If you go by the excess-death numbers, Belgium is still the 2nd worst in the world. Why them, and not their neighbors?
  - raphaelj 6y ago
    Bad luck. A small country or state has an higher chance of being an outlier. 11M people live in Belgium, and a lot of +/- 10M inhabitant regions in larger countries have an higher death rate (Paris, NYC, Lombardy, Madrid ...). If you live in a large country, some highly impacted regions will be offset by less affected regions.
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
The problem with antibodies is they don't seem to last that long. I remember reading about nurses who caught it multiple times. That's really bad news regarding herd immunity IMHO.

vannevar 6y ago

Well, other than having ten times as many deaths as the other Nordic countries: https://www.statista.com/topics/6123/coronavirus-covid-19-in-the-nordics/ https://www.statista.com/topics/6123/coronavirus-covid-19-in... I feel like lives lost is perhaps the better metric of success.

controversy 6y ago
No. Most of Sweden’s deaths were due to poor management at the beginning. They shoved the elderly into old folks homes with Covid positive patients.
- he0001 6y ago
  They didn’t. Although they didn’t protect the elderly in the beginning, which is official.

pedrocr 6y ago

3x more people died than in places that did the consensus strategy. And they haven't stopped having more cases either. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. It will take a long time before that difference disappears, if it ever does, and it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore. What exactly has been vindicated?

triceratops 6y ago
> What exactly has been vindicated? Judging by some of the comments here, News Corp's ability to spin gold out of shit.
orangecat 6y ago
it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore Quarantining entire populations also has costs you can't ignore. What exactly has been vindicated? If the doomsayers were right, Sweden's lack of restrictions should have produced by far the highest death rates in Europe and probably the world. Instead they did better than many countries on all possible metrics: deaths, economic impact, and behavior restrictions. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. Even if true, that doesn't make it obviously the wrong call. On average, people who die from COVID would otherwise have lived around 12 years longer, so that's 48,000 life-years lost. On the other hand, putting 10 million people under lockdown for three months is 2.5 million life-years. If a lockdown decreases the average quality of life by even 2%, then that's a higher cost.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  The idea that Sweden had no lockdown measures at all and other places had draconian lockdowns where the whole population was closed down for three months is a strawman. They are also near the bottom on all those indicators you mentioned. Doing better than the US or Brasil is a very low bar for this. And what we're discussing here isn't that their strategy is "obviously wrong" it's that it's very definitely not "vindicated".
  - elcritch 6y ago

tpmx 6y ago

Yeah, the current positive test rate is relatively low because much we already had 6k deaths (approximately 5x the death rate of our neighbours Norway, Denmark and Finland per capita, iirc) and loads of infected people at risk for chronical diseases. So yes - there is some level of herd immunity already (although mostly in Stockholm/Uppsala/Linköping/Göteborg). We also do a lot less less tests than our neighbouring countries. Denmark in particular is really good at getting testing done, which is also a reason why they are seeing a spike in their results the past few weeks.

he0001 6y ago

There is an important point to make here. Sweden doesn’t have any laws where the government can order a shutdown. So even if they wanted to do a lockdown they couldn’t. Doctors can order individuals to be quarantined but not the country as a whole.

tpmx 6y ago
False. There is a large number of things that the government can limit/recommend to not used/etc that haven't been utilized. (I do recognize this argument from when arguing about this with swedish leftists.)
- he0001 6y ago
  No. A Swedish citizen is, in general, free to go wherever they want on Swedish soil, including private property. This is protected by the Swedish constitution and one of the oldest base laws[0]. Also one reason to the governments slow reaction was due to they had to figure out what laws they could use in a situation like this. [0] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/darfor-kan-sverige-inte-utfarda-utegangsforbud https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/darfor-kan-sverige-inte...
  - okamiueru 6y ago
    Although this is true, the government, with enough political will could make the necessary changes. So instead of scurrying to find actions allowed within existing laws, they very well could have gone the way Norway did in enacting special measures, making greater restrictions legal. Also, there is a very far stretch between what that article discusses, and the measures other Scandinavian countries took (closing schools, limiting size of congregations, etc). The greatest limitation of "free movement" in Norway at least, was the restriction of cabin use when that cabin was in a different municipality.
    - he0001 6y ago
      Well, you don’t change a base law just like that and to do that would require a lot of other laws to be changed. And I’m not sure they would have gathered enough political will to do those changes. And that’s also what the government concluded. It’s kind of what the 2nd amendment to a US citizen is, and an individual right to do whatever they please without having the government to interfere.

vikramkr 6y ago

Compared to their peers in northern Europe that fared far better, the data does not suggest vindication. They have 5x the number of cases per capita compared to countries with similar social/economic/geographic conditions.

tpmx 6y ago
Yeah. Norway/Denmark/Finland all did better than us. :( This is all on the current swedish social democratic government.

JohnTHaller 6y ago

This is The Times in the UK reporting here, wholly owned by News Corp (aka Fox News' parent). They're trying to paint the failures of Sweden (5th highest per-capita death rate in Europe) as a success the same way they do in the US.

Yoofie 6y ago

I found this [1] twitter thread interesting regarding herd immunity. [1]: https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024 https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024

bjornedstrom 6y ago

Can you people please stop with this unhealthy attention. You need to understand that Swedish culture is really unhealthy right now and I ask all of you - I plead to you - as a Swede, to please stop giving Swedish policy attention so we can, on our own, solve our problems and get back to some kind of normalcy and humbleness. What has happened the past 30+ years and has become really problematic the past 10 years is that Sweden has this extremely unhealthy culture of believing in Swedish exceptionalism while at the same time craving attention from other nations, and promoting this belief socially. While the Swedish Corona strategy is not explicitly designed to be contrarian at the world stage (and therefor get a lot of attention), the way Swedish mono-culture works is that the people who implement policy (as well as many citizens) chauvinistically and subconsciously believe that Sweden is somehow superior to other nations and at the same time believe that Sweden (as an exceptional country) has something to teach inferior countries (i.e all other countries). So where we are right now is that we have this unhealthy feedback loop where Sweden initially did it's own thing, and as it turned out to be different that has been a signal to policy makers that Sweden is right. Because Sweden is exceptional, so if the policy is different from inferior countries (i.e all other countries), it must be right. I wish, probably more than anything else, that other countries would just stop giving Swedish policy makers this attention because then maybe, hopefully, our politicians can start to do what's right for our citizens instead of what gets attention and talking points at the world stage. This is far broader than Corona: Sweden gets way too much attention overall, because Swedish politicians and government communication employees have nailed "marketing" more than anything else. They crave this attention and they manufacture policy to get attention, at the expense of the people who live in the country. Often under the guise of marketing Sweden as a "moral super power", superior to other nations. So please, if you are for example a left leaning American, please don't use Sweden as a political piece. Don't give our politicians this attention. There are many other countries that deserve attention but they deserve attention because they do The Right Thing. Like Denmark. Not like Sweden that fucks things up but enjoy the attention it gets when doing so, citizens be damned.

smartbit 6y ago

https://archive.is/axCvG https://archive.is/axCvG for those who can’t read the whole article

IdontRememberIt 6y ago

When crushing the numbers and speaking with relatives in Sweden and Switzerland, it is striking to see that most of the dead counts are in house structures for elderly. When going deeper, there are 2 parameters that seem to correlate with the dead rates: 1) Sweden is lacking medical employees, therefore the medical education of the staff in these structures is very low. Also the geographical death distribution in the country is a big debate because some reasons could be "hot potato" topic 2) "replacebility" of the elderly: in luxury private structures, the death rate is very low because they protect the one paying the bill (so all the procedures are very strict). In public structures, the gov is paying the bill, and as soon as someone dies, it frees a bed for the next "customer". My father in law was in a public structure in Sweden and died this year. For several years we saw horrible things: medical staff/procedures does not care about deadly "common" viruses.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

Sweden left its old and vulnerable people unprotected and thousands of them died. Now the virus is less deadly because there are fewer people left who are vulnerable to it. At the start of the pandemic Anders Tegnel, the architect of Sweden's response to the virus, did not believe that asymptomatic carriers existed [1], so Sweden's Public Health Agency instructed health workers in care homes to only stay at home if they had symptoms and to not wear any PPE at work [2]. So they carried the virus into the care homes and a hecatomb of old people ensued. Obviously, now that the most vulnerable are gone, the virus kills many fewer patients. Swedes don't even need to have immunity to the virus, as such. They just need to be young and healthy enough to survive it if they get it. Not so much heard immunity, as herd culling. For comparison, let's take Greece, where I'm from and which is a country with a similar population to that of Sweden (about 10 million each). Greece imposed a draconian lockdown in early March, as soon as the severity of the pandemic became obvious (we are right next to Italy, after all). The result was about ~2500 infections and ~140 dead by 1st July when the lockdown was lifted [3]. Remember, that's in a country with a similar population as Sweden (but with a much more touchy-feely, huggy-kissy, family-dinner Mediterrannean culture than Sweden). Now we've opened our borders and we're doing business (= tourism) as usual. Infections have also risen, but deaths are still very low, in the single or low double digits daily, so that about 300 people have died since the start of the pandemic. It's all pretty manageable and our health system is not overwhelmed. We had a total lockdown, lost very few people, but we're back in action and deaths are low despite rising infections. And without letting our old and vulnerable die in their thousands. We lost 300, Sweden lost 6,000. If Sweden's approach was vindicated- Greece's approach was vindicated tenfold. ____________ [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly small compared to people who show symptoms. [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-sweden-as-elderly-pay-price-for-coronavirus-strategy https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-swede... The agency’s advice to those managing and working at nursing homes, like its policy towards coronavirus in general, has been based on its judgment that the “spread from those without symptoms is responsible for a very limited share” of those who get infected. Its advice to the care workers and nurses looking after older people such as Bondesson’s 69-year-old mother is that they should not wear protective masks or use other protective equipment unless they are dealing with a resident in the home they have reason to suspect is infected. Otherwise the central protective measure in place is that staff should stay home if they detect any symptoms in themselves. [3] https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/greece https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/greece